How to Find Time to Read Do you want to know how to improve yourself all the time without having to spend more time reading because you get involved in work everyday? Does it sound too good to be true? Well, read on, please. An Average Reader If you are an average reader you can read an average book at the rate of 300 words a minute. You cannot maintain that average, however, unless you read regularly every day. Nor can you reach that speed with hard books in science, mathematics, agriculture, business, or any subject that is new or unfamiliar to you. The chances are that you will never attempt that speed with poetry or want to race through some passages in fiction over which you wish to linger. But for most of the novels, biographies, and books about travel, hobbies or personal interests, if you are an average reader you should have no trouble at all in absorbing meaning and pleasure out of 300 printed words every 60 seconds. Statistics are not always practical, but consider the following: If the average reader can read 300 words a minute of average reading, then in 15 minutes he can read 4 500 words. Multiplied by 7, the days of the week, the product is 315 000. Another multiplication by 12, the months of the year, results in a grand total of 1 512 000 words. That is the total number of words of average reading an average reader can do in just 15 minutes a day for one year. Books vary in length from 60 000 to 1 000 000 words. The average is about 75 000 words. In one year of average reading by an average reader for 15 minutes a day, 20 books will be read. That's a lot of books. It is 4 times the number of books read by public-library borrowers in America. And yet it is easily possible. Sir William Osier One of the greatest of all modern physicians was Sir William Osier. He taught at the Johns Hopkins Medical School He finished his teaching days at McGill University. Many of the out-standing physicians today were his students. Nearly all of the practicing doctors of today were brought up on his medical textbooks. Among his many remarkable contributions to medicine are his unpublished notes on how the people die. His greatness is attributed by his biographers and critics not alone to his profound medical knowledge and insight but to his broad general education, for he was a very cultured man. He was very interested in what men have done and taught throughout the ages. And he knew that the only way to find out what the best experiences of the race had been was to read what people had written. But Osler's problem was the same as everyone else's, only more so. He was a busy physician, a teacher of physicians, and a medical-research specialist. There was no time in a 4-hour day that did not rightly belong to one of these three occupations, except the few hours for sleep, meals, and bodily functions. Osler arrived at his solution early. He would read the last 15 minutes before he want to sleep. If bedtime was set for 11:00 Pm, he read from 11:00 to 11:15. If research kept him up to 2:00 AM, he read from 2:00 to 2:15. Over a very long time, Osler never broke the role once he had established it. We have evidence that after a while he simply could not fall asleep until he had done his 15 minutes of reading. In his lifetime, Osler read a significant library of books. Just do a mental calculation for halfa century of 15-minute reading periods daily and see how many books you get. Consider what a range of interests and variety of subjects are possible in one lifetime. Osler read widely outside of medical specialty. Indeed, he developed from this 15-minute reading habit a vocational specialty to balance his vocational specialization. Among scholars in English literature, Osler is known as an authority on Sir Thomas Browne, seventeenth century English prose master, and Osler's library on Sir Thomas is considered one of t